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Showing posts from November, 2010

Game Chef 2010: Action City!: Special Features

Based on some productive discussion with the first group of playtesters, I've compiled some errata, clarifications, and other stuff into a document called Action City!: Special Features .  Check it out if you have any interest in playtesting; I think it's kinda invaluable for those of you out there who can't read my mind.

Game Chef 2010: Action City! v0.3 Ready for Playtesting (UPDATED)

Action City! v0.3 is online and ready for playtesting! So if you want to playtest it, download it and do that thing, then tell me about it here, or email me at the link provided in the document. While this version is a bit longer, it's still only 18 pages including two pages of character sheets, a "Final Thoughts" page, and copious white space. What can I say? It's not a game that requires a lot of rules text. Here's what's new: Explicit guidelines for what each of the roles (Hero, Opposition, Friend) is supposed to do in the game Expanded explanations of what the different difficulty levels mean and how they fit into the narrative A new type of scene (the Cutscene) for the Opposition and how it's used What it means to frame a scene A brief but concrete paragraph on how to select appropriate Methods when rolling A little more on the Arsenal to further delineate how it works A bit more on how to use Goons, the Muscle, and the Functionary in pla

Game Chef 2010: "Nice Job, Finalist."

So the word's come down from Game Chef 2010 Master Chef Jonathan Walton's chosen Action City! as a Finalist, which is great news. More importantly, he had some insightful commentary on the game: Concept:  A game about 80s action movies. Explosion-tastic. Execution:  Unlike several other games, which have several single-protagonist stories happening in parallel, this game is explicitly about one character, the hero, with everyone else playing allies or enemies. The explicit division between scenery chewing, talky scenes and action scenes makes good design sense. It’s perhaps a bit strange that both the hero and the other characters have equivalent stats, since the hero in these movies is usually both super-competent and unkillable (i.e. they die hard, but these movie often try to portray them as normal dudes, so perhaps that make sense. Resolution contains an unusual combination of both stat+trait invocation and setting difficulties, though, in this case, it seems as if the